III. The verse

The public would perhaps have become accustomed to not understanding ; the unintelligible imposes respect. But they could not endure being given in place of poetry lines in which nothing was to he found of that wliich serves to distinguish poetry from prose. The symbolists removed all the signs by wliicli an educated Frenchman might perceive that he was not reading prose. With some indeed, there was a tendency to the « enjambement », the running of one line over into another, Ihus breaking the verso as Hugo would never have broken it. With them all, there was a multiplying of the hiatus : the regular caesura falls in the middle of a word or on a mute syllabe; the rhyme, now inexact, now enfeebled, and often abolished, hut in revenge reappearing in ihe middle of the verse ; no alternation of mas-

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culme and feminine rhymes; the masculine rhymes with the leminme, and the singulars wdth the plurals ; isolated lines ol eleven, thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen syllabes reappear suddenly here and there, with lines which cannot he reduced to any nurnber of syllabes on account of the caprice of the e mutes, wdiich are sometimes counted and sometimes annulled. Under the names of polymorphous, liberated, or free verse, we have false verses, « deliciously and intentionally false », friends would say, or sophisticated prose paradoxically cut off into unequal lines.

And here, again, beneath the extravagancies, and in the contradictions, was followed the natural evolution of Frencli vcrsilication, — a clear and legitimate evolution.

Ronsard, who had reinstated in honor the Alexandrine, had not perfected its technique, and had multiplied its irregularities before defining its regularity. Malherbe had fixed the simple form of the Alexandrine; he made it a rational basis for all future complications. He renders the ryythm sensible to the rudest ear by the constant caesura on the hemistich and by the strength of the rhyme emphasized by a pause. Thus the classic Alexandrine is solidlj^ constructed on two principal rhythmical accents that always coincide with the tonic accents on the sixth and twelfth syllabes, and are always strengthened by pauses of the meaning’ Within the hemistiches, secondary accents that are purely intensive and without obligatory pause, and that are distributed according to the sense, lessen the monotonous oscillation of the rhythm, without effacing the principal accents.

But it has not been sufficiently noticed in studies on French versification, that one of the most efficacious factors of poetical rhythm is the relation which unites the line to the phrase. Malherbe founded this relation on the agreement of the meaning and the rhythm, by the subordination of the sense to the rhythm. T mean to say that the rhythmical design determines the grammatical design, and marks the place of the principal punctuations before hand. The meaning pauses at the caesura, at the rhyme ; and the phrase always finishes at the end of a line. Thus the poetic phrase of the classics was distributed through quatrains and distiches ; each line, each hemistich even, containing a dis-

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tinct element of syntax. Maynard, pushing; this principle to its logical conclusion, desired that each line should he « detached », should offer a complete meaning; and the absolute harmony of the phrase and of the line was realized.

Neither Chenier, nor the Romanticists themselves, destroyed the classic type of the Alexandrine. They merely introduced into it discords which, to have their lull effect, implied the persistency of the regular rhythm, with which they were destined to contrast. They practised the discord of the phrase and of the line ; they over balanced the middle accent by changeable accents which the sense indicates, and which strong punctuation could enforce : they weakened the linal accent by removing all suspension of the meaning. The regular accents could always be visibly perceived in Chénier; less visibly, but as readily in Victor Hugo, who never consented to make the sixth syllabe of the line fall on an e mute, nor in the middle of a word. The irregular and troubled design of the Romantic phrase is traced in the « quadrillage » of the classic line, and it is the perception of this discord which gives their savor to many of the Romantic rhythms.

The classic line is found almost in its native purity among the Parnassians; save in the lines of the drama or story, discords, the displacing of the caesura, and the running over of the line are rare. Writing in distiches reappears. The special survival from the Romantic agitation is that the caesura has ceased to he a stop ; it is an intensity, not a pause of the voice. The meaning is arrested only at tlie rhyme; and since the inner accents of the hemistiches often have a value equal to the middle accent not sustained by a pause, the line seems to glide along all of a piece, hardly articulated by the caesura, to the full and sonorous rhyme. Wliile in the classic verse, the fundamental element was tlie hemistich, so, with the Parnassian school, rhythmical unity consisted in the verse being written out at a single throw.

ddie Parnassian verse sprang from the Romantic verse, hut tliere might have issued from this something else. By no longer considering the running over of the line and the dis-

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placing ot the caesura as a deformation of the regular type, but as the basis of a new regularity, Verlaine created a new line. At the same time that, by legitimatizing the hiatus, he npened to poetry unexplored mines of locution and of resonances, he despoiled the sixth and twelfth syllabes of all their metrical distinctions. He abolished the accents and pauses in these two places, and purposely installed in the rhyme, as at the middle caesura, prepositions and articles on which the voice could not risewdthout giving the rhythm the air of a parody.

Here is an example or two of these « emancipated » Alexandrines ;

0 tes manières de venir! j’y mets du mien Aussi, mais toi, que c’est gentil quand c’est du tien.

Oui, tes manières de t’y prendre pour venir Me voir et m’étonner à ne plus en finir*.

Vous suspendiez aux branches des guirlandes, à L’entour d’un bassin vénéré, cher aux naïades

Every vestige ot classical rhythm has indeed disappeared ; the accent may he placed anywhere. There is nothing fixed hut the rhyme which comes at the and of twelve syllabes.

The rhyme, the only one of the traditional factors which remains, ought, it would seem, to gain in importance ; but, on the contrary, just the opposite has happened. Verlaine despises the « rich » rhyme, « this half-penny jewel which rings hollow and false under the file ». He ridicules the exact rhyme; he rhymes feminine terminations with masculine ; he makes much use of assonance ; and he stifles the rhyme both by a diminution of its fullness and of its exactitude, and by the encroachment on the next verse, which juggles it away. In reality, the rhyme loses nothing ; it is only its function that changes.

Rhyme had always been regarded as a signal, the function of which was to mark the end of the line. But is the

1. Verlaine, Dans les limbes, OEuvres complètes, 1. Ill, p. 51.

"2. Viélé-Griffm, Poèmes et Poésies, p. 52.

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line forced lo bear external marks of its structure ? is it necessary that the hearer should explain to himself how the line is made ? With Verlaine, no more visible mechanism . the rhythm is made te be felt, not analyzed, by the public; Consequently, the rhyme, dismissed from its duty ot automatical warning, will once more become a musical note, whose recallings, modifications, and degradations illustrate a melodious design through the confused riches of the contatenation of sounds. Symbolism, while seeming to weaken rhyme, removes Irom it all heaviness and monotony, endows it with a manifold resonance that is delicate and light.

Rhyme no longer cuts a line ; it is merged in the continuity of the rhythmical development. Neither pause nor accent, nor even rhyme, any longer necessarily signalizes the end of the line; the individual distinctness of the Alexandrine has vanished. The rhythmical unity is no longer the line or hemistich; it is the member of the sentence, enclosed in a portion of a line, or running over two lines. The meaning determines every unity, and places the accents which give the line its music. So that, while pushing the Romantic discord to its limits, Verlaine, and after him symbolism, reestablisted the harmony betwen the meaning and the rhythm which existed among the classics. But the relation has been reversed. Malherbe molded the sentence upon tlie metre, and inserted tlie grammatical pauses at the pause o, the cadence ; the present poetry moldes the rhythm on the phrase, and articulates the line at the places where the meaning is lield in suspense.

The transformation of the Alexandrine has naturally been extended to other verse, and to the stroplie. The classics, \\ ho found it impracticable lo realize small detached lines, grouped them in twos, tlirees, or fours, between necessary pauses. For example, the strophe ol ten lines was broken by a quatrain and two triplets. But, as far as possible, thef running over of the line in each group was avoided ; each line contained a distinct grammatical element. Neither the Romanticists nor the Parnassians have changed the structure ol the strophe in any very striking way. Ideas and style aside, neither the « Mages » nor « Ibo » would have

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shocked Malherbe. Verlaine and the symbolists at first suppressed the necessity for inner pauses in the strophe ; later, they abolished the distinction of the strophe as well as of the lines ; they ran them over and put them out of measure ; they carried on the rhyme from one line into the next, from one strophe to another, in such a way that the meaning and not the metre determined the accents and pauses. It was no longer the fixed structure of the strophe, it was the individual movement of the phrase which produced the rhythm. As in the case of the Alexandrine, merely the number of syllabes and the rhyme remained, so of the strophe there remains only the number of fines and the distribution of the rhymes.

This was still too much. Every fixed form that imposed an exact rhythm was distasteful to the symbolists ; so they strove to pervert the strophes in order to render thorn unrecognizable. Verlaine disguised his quatrains by designing in them the rhymes of the terza rima'. Others add a fifteenth lino to the sonnet. In the same way, they forsook the common and familiar verse for rare and unusual metres. They cultivated uneven lines, to which the ear was not accustomed® : the lines of five and nine syllabes did not carry in themselves harmonies already made. They tried lines of eleven and thirteen syllabes, which appeared like false Alexandrines. They braved the decreed of conservative theorists, wdio forbade, in the name of physiology, the existence of lines longer than the Alexandrine, and invented long lines of fourteen and sixteen syllabes.

But it is difficult to prevent these long lines from seeming like a collection of^ shorter verses ; to prevent all these new and rare lines of a precise number of syllabes from having the appearance of being constructed with elements that have been always utilized, — with groups of three, four, five, or six syllabes. Thus symbolism was to end forcibly in a « vers-lihrisrn », in which all fixed structure of strophe or line should disappear.

t. Œuvres complètes, 1. 1, p. 497.